НОВОСТИ

from December 17, 2015 to February 15, 2016
From Parma to Casalmaggiore via Rome and Bologna, this exhibition provides a step-by-step account of the whirlwind career of one of Italy’s finest draftsmen.

In the early decades of the 16th century, amid the political turmoil and confusion of Italy, a new style developed that would soon spread throughout Europe: Mannerism. Nothing of the like had been seen since Gothic art. From nation to nation, the same refined, elegant forms and feats of artistry emerged and interacted. The art of Michelangelo, Correggio and Raphael provided a solid springboard for this fragile, scholarly and skillful new aesthetic which demanded flair, requiring art to live up to its own high opinion of itself and insisting that the quest for the ideal should constantly be upheld.

Francesco Mazzola, born in Parma—hence his nickname Parmigianino (“the little one from Parma”)—was one of the very first practitioners of this exalted art form. With his impressive and precocious skill as a draftsman, his personal elegance and charm, and the youthful genius that inspired him almost until his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven, he was seen by his contemporaries as a new Raphael… which he wasn’t. Or not only. Fired by a desire to equal Raphael, he strove for a worldly beauty (venustà), becoming radically nonconformist in his treatment of the most familiar subjects, but eventually abandoning his relentless quest for the subtleties of art in favor of vain alchemical research.

Organized by:

Dominique Cordellier, Laura Angelucci, Roberta Serra, Musée du Louvre.